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Europe, US make the most of manure

The humble pile of dung. An amazing thing, and so versatile, too. Not just the staple material of the more humble gardener, used for most probably tens of thousands of years to fertilize soil to grow vegetable produce and crops with, it’s also seeing something of a renaissance recently.

For the uninitiated, Wattle & Daub was (an maybe even still is in so far as restoration projects might allow) a building material used most recently in Tudor times:

“Wattle and daub are building materials used in constructing houses. A woven latticework of wooden stakes called wattles is daubed with a mixture of clay and sand and sometimes animal dung and straw to create a structure.”

Some might argue you just couldn’t make this shit up. But you’d be wrong! You can make this shit up into lots of things, including walls for houses.

“Researchers at Michigan State University think they have come up with a new way of disposing of some of the millions of tons of cow manure produced in the US each year: use it to build with.

More specifically, they are advocating using sterilised cow manure to replace sawdust in making fibreboard.”

Indeed, what with ever-increasing pressures on farmers to diversify, this is an ideal opportunity to make that old Yorkshire adage work: “where there’s muck, there’s brass” which means where there’s dirt, there’s money to be had:

“Farmers in the US are under pressure to find new ways of dealing with their cow pats. It can cost $200 per year to process the production of a single cow, so some farmers are facing a very big bill every year.”

But those craaazzy Americans are only the shadow of history repeating itself, as I pointed out earlier. This is people getting back to basics and making use of the kind of stuff that might otherwise sit in settling tanks and cost a small fortune to taken away and be processed.